The
Harm Done to Innocentsby Chris
Toensing, Editor, Middle East Report, MERIP's op-ed from the Boston Globe,
16 September 2001

In December 1998, I met
a waiter in the quiet Egyptian port of Suez. As I sipped tea in his cafe,
he pulled up a chair to chat, as Egyptians often do to welcome strangers.
Not long into our amiable repartee, he looked me in the eye.

"Now I want to ask you a blunt question,"
he said. "Why do you Americans hate us?" I raised my eyebrows, so he explained
what he meant and, in doing so, provided some insights into why others
hate us.

Numerous United Nations resolutions
clearly define Israel's occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East
Jerusalem as illegal. Yet Israel receives 40 percent of all US foreign
aid, more than $3.5 billion annually in recent years, roughly $500 per
Israeli citizen. (The average Egyptian will earn $656 this year.)

Israel uses all of this aid to build
new settlements on Palestinian land and to buy US-made warplanes and helicopter
gunships. "Why do Americans support Israel when Israel represses Arabs?"
the waiter asked.

He went on: Evidence clearly shows
that the US-led economic sanctions on Iraq punish Iraqi civilians while
hardly touching Saddam Hussein's regime. A UNICEF study in 1999 backed
him up, saying that 500,000 children under five would be alive today if
sanctions did not exist. Surely Iraqi children are not enemies of international
peace and security, the waiter expostulated, even if their ruler is a brutal
dictator.

The United States presses for continued
sanctions because Hussein is flouting United Nations resolutions, but stands
by Israel when it has flouted UN Resolution 242 (which urges Israel to
withdraw from land occupied in the 1967 War) for over 30 years. Arabs and
Muslims suffer from these and other US policies.

The only logic this young Egyptian
could see was that America was pursuing a worldwide war against Islam,
in which the victims were overwhelmingly Muslim. America is a democracy,
he concluded, so Americans must hate Muslims to endorse this war.

I groaned inwardly. Here, I thought,
was a person as woefully misinformed about America as most Americans are
about the Middle East. Painstakingly, in my rusty Arabic, I explained that
although the United States is a democracy, we Americans do not choose our
government's allies, nor do we select its adversaries. We do not vote on
the annual foreign aid budget. There are no referenda on the ballot asking
whether the United States should send abundant aid to Israel, or whether
the United States should press the UN Security Council into maintaining
sanctions against Iraq, or whether the Fifth Fleet should prowl the Persian
Gulf to protect our oil supply.

Americans do have the ability to
vote out of office politicians who embrace various foreign policies, but
Americans rarely have accurate information about the effect of those policies,
in the Middle East or elsewhere. If they knew, I argued, they would speak
up in opposition, because Americans have a fundamental sense of fairness.
I concurred that it was imperative to debunk Hollywood stereotypes of Arabs
and Muslims as wild-eyed, Koran-waving fanatics. These are pernicious ideas
that stand in the way of fair judgment.

Our conversation lasted for hours.
When we reached a pause, the waiter invited me to dinner at his house.
There I met his brother, a devout Muslim.

He too asked me why America hates
Arabs and Muslims. I spent two more hours talking with him. When I left,
he told me warmly how happy he was "to connect with an American on a human
level." He and I shook hands like old friends, as we agreed that both Americans
and Arab Muslims should strive to puncture the myth that "we" are somehow
essentially different from "them."

A civilized human society cannot
afford to think in those tribal terms. That type of thinking leads to despair,
and thence to wholly unjustifiable disasters such as Americans have just
experienced. Most Americans who have lived or traveled in the Arab world
can relate similar experiences: Arabs are entirely capable of differentiating
between a people and the actions of its government, or the values of a
people and the political agenda of a narrow minority of them. What confuses,
and, yes, angers them is that we do not seem to return the favor.

Scant days after I returned from
Suez to Cairo, President Clinton ordered US fighter-bombers to attack Iraq,
ostensibly because Hussein had expelled UN weapons inspectors from his
country. The "surgical strikes" of Operation Desert Fox, like previous
and subsequent campaigns, maimed and killed defenseless Iraqi civilians.
Meanwhile, virtually every news outlet in Egypt ran pictures of grinning
US seamen painting "Happy Ramadan" on the missiles destined for Baghdad.
Those pictures mocked the suffering of Muslims, just as they mocked my
attempts at playing cultural ambassador.

To the Arab and Muslim world, Americans
project an image of utter indifference to the Iraqi civilian casualties
of sanctions and bombing -- people who were also "moms and dads, friends
and neighbors," as President Bush said of the Americans we mourn today.
During Desert Fox, there was no outrage at the callous black humor of the
missile-painters, or the purposeful insult to Islam's holy month. Despite
the obvious failure of bombing to achieve our stated objective (ridding
Iraq of Hussein), and the harm done to innocents in the process, no mass
anti-war movement spilled into our streets to force a change in US policy.
Hardly anyone has suggested since that US officials should be held accountable
for willful acts of terror, though terror is surely what Iraqis must feel
when bombs rain from the sky.

Only days after Desert Fox, the Iraq
story faded from the front pages entirely, and the nation returned to its
obsession with the Monica Lewinsky scandal. What could that waiter in Suez
have been thinking of my careful distinctions then?

He does not have "links" to Osama
bin Laden. He is not a prospective suicide bomber, nor would he defend
their indefensible actions. Today I have no doubt that he feels intense
sympathy for "us."

After watching unjust US policies
continue for years without apology, after hearing of incidents of racist
anti-Arab backlash following the execrable crimes of Sept. 11, perhaps
he also senses great tragedy in that the hijackers spoke to Americans in
a language the US government speaks all too well abroad.